Sometimes Doris hated Thea for it, but mostly she hated herself more.
Their raft dipped suddenly, tossing them down a rapid that nearly capsized them. The unbroken parts of her weren’t quick enough or strong enough to keep her body steady, and she’d have flown off if not for Thea throwing all her weight on top of her. She didn’t budge even after the water settled.
“You can get off now,” Doris said.
“What was that?”
Doris tried to push her off. “The water is crazy. That’s all.”
“Did you not see what I saw? You were there.”
“I saw something, but it doesn’t mean that everything is something. You’ve got to calm down.”
“Jesus, whatever.” Thea waved her sister away, as if there were anywhere to go.
Doris dropped her fingers into the water. It was so cold. An ache ran up her body. Scanning the water, she searched for any indication of the thing. She tried to pretend that she wasn’t even sure what it was; everything she’d ever known had congealed into a brown wall of water anyway. God only knows what it dragged with it.
“Is this fun to you or something?” Thea spat dart-like accusations with precision.
Doris waved Thea away in kind. “I’m just loving life, sister.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“I never said you were.”
“You always do this. Shit on anything I say, just because I’m the one saying it.”
Doris was tired and all the way done with this nonsense. “You caught me. I’ve just been rubbing my hands together in the dark. Just waiting for you to fall so I could be the first one to stomp on you while you’re down.”
“Fuck—,” Thea said, whatever she really meant to say catching in her throat. Thankfully, she didn’t finish the thought.
Clothes clinging to her skin, Doris could see every ripple of Thea’s spine. Her oversized sweatshirt circled her body like loose skin—she was too thin, probably starved. Closer to death than any flood could bring her.
Thea spoke under her breath, her chest shuddering as she did.
“I can’t hear you,” Doris said.
“Why do you always have to be so fucking mean?”
The questions were nothing but a fuse, and Doris was fit to explode. Years of damming up everything that made her human had taken its toll. To Thea, she was mean. To herself, she’d been screaming into an empty room for years.
And still, the one person she’d hoped and prayed and expected to understand, didn’t. What was there to do about it now?
So she covered her eyes with her arm and said nothing. Thea kept to her side. They no longer touched.
Thea stared into the distance. A wall of water surrounded them. It bellowed from the sky and bubbled from the ground. The city spun into itself, consumed and ravaged, the sisters clanging against it on their metal raft. It all happened so quickly—Thea assumed by now they’d have been upended by something. Perhaps smashed into building, knocked off by thrashing debris, capsized and done for. Yet they carried on in a surreal drift. Or maybe it just seemed like they did. Her head was slow, seeming to react a beat or two behind her brain. She stared at the water for what seemed like days but could not have been more than minutes. Or maybe it was hours? Or days? She really couldn’t tell outside of the incoming dark.
It was growing darker by the moment. It couldn’t have been days. The first night had yet to begin.
The sheet metal wobbled as she jerked. Doris lay motionless next to her, a hand dangling over the edge. The flow of fresh blood had slowed, and what remained had coagulated underneath their bodies.
How the fuck had she managed to fall asleep again in all this rain? She was worse off than when she’d gone under.
Where were they? How far had they floated? The storm hadn’t stopped, still seething and hurling atmosphere at them, but it was dark—so dark that she’d forgotten what the word meant. Dark before had still meant streetlights and televisions, glowing glass doors of the Circle K, the bright fluorescents of the gas station at the Union Avenue intersection. It had meant voices and people and whirring noises, electricity and static, but this dark was absolute. Nothing but occasional lightning and her sister’s breathing to keep her centered.
Every whistle and swish and plinking patter of rain against water was magnified. The flood world smelled like wet wood, obliterating the comforting sheen of gasoline and car exhaust familiar to her. This space had now been reclaimed.
So when something bobbed up and down in the water a short distance behind her, Thea wheeled around to greet it, popping bones lethargic from rest and exhaustion.
“Doris,” she whispered.
Bloop. The sound of something plunking itself under the water. It was here.
“Wake up, Doris.”
Her lungs were fit to shout, but she thought better of it. She didn’t want it to hear her fear, whatever it was. She wanted to shake her sister awake, but then again, what good would that do? Doris wasn’t afraid of it. In fact, she seemed downright entranced by it, so she was safer asleep than awake. Conscious, she might just dive in after it.
Thea didn’t hear much else for a while, just the normal noise of wreckage floating about in the flood. Their thin raft collided with some of it—mostly sticks and splinters of larger things, then something even larger upended one end of their raft, speared on the corner. It was a body, a man, bloated and snagged by the collar of his shirt. Thea kicked at it until it dislodged, wanting to get up and run to get away from it. An older man, probably just reading the paper and eating a sandwich or watching basketball, maybe thinking about retiring, and whoosh, out he goes into the water, filled up from the inside out with brown mud. Only to be kicked in the jaw by an itchy tweaker who’d managed to survive against all logic and sense of propriety.
Loosed, she watched him flutter away in a tailspin, up and down, under the water, then back up again, until he was a vague lump almost out of sight. He went down again, and this time never returned to the surface.
Thea searched for him, panicking, dread threatening to sink her entirely. It was out there, and it had taken that man’s body and stolen it and it was out there waiting to take them too, and then—bloop—behind her. There the body was, simply moved a bit.
But it wasn’t a bit. It was at least twenty or thirty feet in a matter of seconds. There, then gone, then back again, and it wouldn’t leave them alone.
“Fuck you,” she said, her voice torn and struggling. “Fuck off. Go away. Fuck you!”
Each word built off the one before it. Before she could stop herself, she was screaming at the water, everything spilling out. “Fuck off! Just go away! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!”
Only once Thea started pounding at the water did Doris jolt awake. Thea saw her pull her hands to her chest as if bitten, but still Thea smacked and screamed and thrashed at the water.
“GO THE FUCK AWAY!”
Doris craned her head to see her sister, just watching it all pour out. Thea thought she might puke but didn’t. As if she didn’t have enough shit, enough everything, just her luck—there were monsters here, too. As if the water wasn’t dangerous enough on its own.
Screaming curses, screaming commands, screaming for the sake of screaming until she felt a clammy hand on her exposed shoulder and knew it was time to stop.
“There is something out there, Doris. I’m telling you. And it’s big.”
Doris tightened against her sister. “And if it wants us, it wants us.”
“No.” Thea shrugged her off. “Fuck that noise. That’s not how this happens. I’ll be damned if I let that disgusting thing so much as look at me.”
Doris placed her hands over her stomach. “How do you plan to avoid that? It’s probably looking at you as we speak.” Fingers entwined, she rolled her argument around as if no more than a generic pleasantry. Oh, you mus
t try the shortbread crackers. I’ve got a new tea blend that’s so relaxing. How is the family? The kids? Oh, and exactly how do you expect to slay the gigantic sea monster?
“I’m not going to roll over and take it up the ass. It can fucking try me.”
“You with all your prideful might. It’ll sink you before you get a toe in the water.”
“How do you know? You some kind of monster expert?” Her eyes darted away immediately after saying it.
Doris clenched her jaw, but otherwise let the slight pass without comment.
“If it’s as big as you say it is, and it’s stalking us, for Christ’s sake, what the hell are you going to do about it stuck on a piece of sheet metal with me?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not gonna jump into its mouth.”
Doris stared sideways at her. “And I will?”
“You ever stop to think that my many acts of rebellion aren’t always about you?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Thea shrugged. “It’s what you said. And I will? Just jump in, for all I fucking care.”
Hefting herself onto her elbows, Doris sniffed the air, hoping to seem indifferent. “Do we have to do this now?”
“All I said was that I wasn’t going to die without a fight. You seem to think that’s just a crazy idea. I don’t know what to tell you.” Thea’s hands jazzed out as she spoke.
“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I meant.” She turned up toward the sky again, closing her eyes to the steady pound of rain.
“Oh, I know what you meant just fine.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” Her sentence drawled on an extra syllable.
Thea pulled her shin close and tied her loose shoelaces. “You don’t think I can survive. At least, not on my own.”
“Bullshit.” She laughed because wasn’t this some nonsense? But then she turned her cheek.
Silence lay over them. There wasn’t much else to say. Doris folded into herself, her feet still dangled in the water. Thea tried to yank them up, but Doris snapped at her to keep her hands off her. Thea hadn’t liked that much, bubbling over with the urge to protest—But that thing, you’ll get cold, they’ll fall off—but decided against it. Every word with her sister was like a snake bite anyway.
“What was that?” Thea said.
And that’s when the sheet metal lifted—was thrown—at one end, and sister toppled on top of sister as both of them rolled into the water in a tangle of bruised limbs and confusion. Water shot up her nostrils and down her throat, and she choked. The pressure of Doris’s body lifted—her sister was gone. Up, down, everything was dark. She couldn’t find the surface. Her arms struck at the water as she went down and down.
The noise was the worst, like glass crushed between teeth, like broken whale songs. It was the sound her ears made to fill the silence, but loud as a jet engine. The noise filled her as quick as the water until all she wanted was to be free of it. She’d do anything she had to do to get away from it—rip a hole in her skin, drown, anything.
Just when she thought she was done, just as the last bit of air slunk free of her lungs, she surfaced. Gagging and choking and screaming, she surfaced. She called out to the sister she couldn’t see.
Doris was gone.
Air. She couldn’t breathe. Pressure mounted in her skull, bulging at her sinuses. She just kept sinking. Bodies were buoyant, filled with all sorts of gases. Shouldn’t she be floating by now? Was Thea up there calling for her as she sank and sank and kept sinking?
Sinking and sinking . . . This was where she was supposed to be, down here. Down in the dark.
There wasn’t any light, but she could breathe again. Could have been an air pocket or the surface or God knew what, but retching and gasping was all she could do. What she could feel of her spine lit up like a zipper up and down her back. If this was dying, it sure as fuck wasn’t calm, it wasn’t peaceful, and nothing flashed before her eyes. It was dark and wet, and she was scared. She couldn’t hear that she’d been screaming. She couldn’t tell that she had surfaced. Her sinking had been floating, her head was upside down, her throat felt like fire, and snot spewed out of her nose.
Then she opened her eyes.
The metal was gone. Thea was gone. “Thea!” Her voice cracked. Waves lapped into her mouth until she choked, calling again and again to her sister. She fought the flood to keep herself above water, but her arms and her body were so weary. She wanted to sleep and forget about it. Fuck, she just wanted a real nap.
A call from somewhere. Her name.
“Thea, where are you?” Doris gagged on mud. The wounds on her torso ripped open again. She was losing it. “Thea!”
A garbled shout in return. Panicked. Repeatedly until Doris caught all the words: “It’s following me.”
Out of ideas—she couldn’t swim; she could barely stay above surface—she returned the chatter. “Follow my voice. Follow my voice. Come here, follow my voice.” She dipped under the water for a rest, then pushed herself up again. “Follow my voice!”
Each rotation took longer, more labored, her voice softened with fatigue. “Follow my voice!”
Doris couldn’t hear her anymore. She screamed, and her frantic paddling got closer, but Thea was quiet now.
Up, down. Up, down. Climbing an invisible ladder. Silent. Eyes flashing. Drowning.
And she felt all right.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thea's glance glided over the puckered metal of the towel rack. Clutching green cotton under her chin, she dried her face. Cold water didn’t do much for the purple bags under her eyes or their bloodshot centers, but it was enough to perk her up a bit to fake it. The din of the party downstairs surged and dimmed—hoots and yells to hushed silence. She squatted in the bathtub, not wanting to deal with any of it, wishing she could fall asleep right then and there and be left alone for a single fucking night.
She was dead tired, the kind of tired that infected the bone, but she couldn’t pinpoint why. Probably hung over, but she couldn’t quite remember. Probably because she was hung over. There was water all over the floor.
This had happened before, and all she needed was a little time to sort herself out. Her brain powered on a bit more slowly after a rough night. By the time she got downstairs, most everything should have clicked into place.
One voice distinguished itself over the rest. It was a man’s voice that Thea didn’t recognize. Whoever he was, he had captivated the room. Some woman wheezed her emphysema laugh over and over, the pain of the effort crawling up the ceramic steps, snaking under the crack in the door like a gas leak. She could hide in the bathroom all night, and the party would still find her, so she’d better put herself together and get it over with.
Resigned to the task, she pulled herself up and started throwing open the drawers in the vanity. Combs and brushes, mirrors and a hair straightener, lip gloss and all sorts of girly shit clattered together, and she rummaged through them in search of her concealer stick, eventually finding it on the floor behind the toilet. The makeup crumpled against her skin, and she smoothed it with a rough finger. Long past its expiration date, it was the only thing keeping up appearances these days. Every time she used it, she thought, I’ll get a new one tomorrow. But she always seemed to forget by the time tomorrow arrived.
No amount of cover-up or mouthwash could remove the stench of her hangover, but even a disheveled appearance would raise fewer questions than no appearance at all. Honestly, she wasn’t even sure what the party was for. Wait—shouldn’t she know? Pausing with her hands palming the marble counter, she mucked through her memories in search of whatever the fuck she was doing here, but it didn’t come. She didn’t even remember walking into the bathroom, for that matter.
That was probably a very bad sign. Oh well. It’d come to her eventually, whatever it was.
Smoothing her shirt,
she sucked in her stomach, rolled back her shoulders, and hoped her queasy gut stayed put. Then she opened the door.
The hallway revealed a disappointed look from the face of her sister, who had been standing outside the bathroom, waiting.
Surprising—Thea would have expected Doris’s presence to curl smoke-like under the door. “Hello, sister.”
“You’re up,” Doris said. She couldn’t even fake the pleasantries.
“Do my bathroom habits interest you?”
Doris peered over Thea’s shoulder, as if to catch her with a secret lover hiding behind the towel rack. “Just waiting my turn.”
“Pardon me. Were the other two toilets in the house unacceptable to Her Majesty?” But whatever Thea lobbed at her, it slid off her cold façade with ease. If she’d even heard her at all.
“You done?”
“Help yourself.”
Doris provided a wide berth, then separated them once again with a closed door, leaving Thea to her own devices in the hallway.
The air smelled of fire and cheap cologne. Someone laughed again, that same loud man whom she already couldn’t stand. There was a tremble in his voice of a man trying too hard. That same shaky faux confidence that marked every one of Doris’s man-toys she’d deemed worthy enough to bring around. She might as well pee on them, though Thea doubted that her sister really gave a shit if they wandered, as long as they did whatever it was that she needed them to do first. And for all Thea’s pondering, she never could figure out what that was. Doris was the last person she expected to tolerate the emotional neediness of another human. It just wasn’t her.
Arriving to the party was like waking up in a strange bed and not remembering how you got there, but instead of a bed it was a party and everyone was staring at you as if your eyeballs were melting and they didn’t care about your eyeballs so much as the drippy eyeball stains you were leaving all over the floor.
A Flood of Posies Page 11